You would surely have to qualify what you mean by "optimal". I would say from a "roll-the-dice" perspective that an average engineer or designer that goes to work at an established Fortune 500 corp is going to make far more than the same at a prestige startup.

Full disclosure, I'm biased, I worked at one of those startups and got screwed bigtime; now I work quite happily at a mundane but profitable adtech firm for over 2x the total comp.